Legacy Code Rocks

In this special episode recorded at the AATC 2017, Andrea Goulet speaks with Martin D. Lund, a scrum-certified software engineer who helps run an engineering team and a parent to three children on the autism spectrum. Founder of Agile for Autism (http://www.agile4autism.com/), a nonprofit initiative to help parents build educational and therapeutic programs for children with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Marty shares tips for working with someone on the autism spectrum and how he successfully implemented agile practices in his parenting.

In this special episode, returning guest, speaker and Agile technical coach Llewellyn Falco co-hosts with Corgibytes’ Chief Code Whisperer M. Scott Ford. They recap the talks they attended and cover topics such as pitching talks, the value of meetups and practice, adapting talks on-the-fly, pair programming, how technical “debt” is like credit card debt and weight gain, and more.

Returning guest Woody Zuill is a veteran programmer, sought-after consultant and international speaker, as well as credited with both the “no estimates” and the “mob programming” movements. In this episode, we discuss estimates, working on a problem versus working on a symptom, paradigm shifts, and much more!

Dean of Arts & Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Andrew Russell is a trained historian and researcher covering topics such as the history of technology and the history and societal aspects of computing. He is also the co-author, with Lee Vinsel, of Hail the Maintainers, and, together, they are behind The Maintainers, a global, interdisciplinary research network, which holds an annual conference in April. In this episode, we discuss the love of maintaining vs creating, why maintenance is overlooked compared to innovation, creative destruction, lifecycles, and so much more.

Scott Nimrod is a thriving entrepreneur, software consultant, and blogger who founded Bizmonger, a business that focuses on native application development for mobile and desktop environments, test automation, and the art of engineering reliable software. In this episode, we discuss being a software craftsman, taming code with empathy, functional programming, and taking charge of your professional life.

Robert Sösemann is an Agile and lean-code enthusiast, Lead Product Developer at Up2Go International, and inventor of ApexMetrics, a Code Climate engine. Lorenzo Frattini is a Salesforce-certified Technical Architect and creator of Clayton.io, a code-review robot. In this episode, we discuss code quality, how to measure it, when code is “done,” its business value, and more!

Michael Feathers (R7K Research & Conveyance) is a luminary, expert in software and organization design, and author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code. Over the past 20 years, he has spoken at conferences around the world, and some even call him the “godfather of legacy code.” In this episode, we discuss software best practices, Conway’s Law – or as Michael sometimes calls it, The Fundamental Theorem of Software Engineering –, the impact of code that could be deleted, and feature selection.

From early employee at AppFolio and Citrix to international consultant and speaker on team dynamics, Heidi Helfand is also the author of Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams. In this episode, we cover team stagnation, its causes, elements and best practices of dynamic reteaming and when reteaming should be an option.

Rebecca Dovi, who has over 20 years of experience teaching computer sciences, is the Director of Education at CodeVA, an organization that wrote legislation and worked with policymakers to make Virginia the first state where every child will receive access to essential Computer Science literacy – including coding – from kindergarten through graduation. In this episode, we discuss what that law entails, gender-bias triggers, how to attract more women to the field, and much more!

Pavneet Singh Saund is a web developer, a team lead at Komplett Group (a leading Scandinavian player in e-commerce) and founder of a blog called Coding with Empathy (http://codingwithempathy.com/). In this episode, we explore the various aspects of empathy, how sympathy and empathy are different, and the application of empathy for developers.